Auckland Gas Company - History

History

The Auckland Gas Company was formed in 1862 as the first joint stock company in New Zealand. It was also the first private services provider in Auckland. In the 1870s, the company bought and developed a large site in Freemans Bay to build a gasworks (roughly on and east of the site of the current New World supermarket), with further buildings (mainly workshops) and offices on Beaumont Street.

In the late 1960s the Kapuni gas fields were openened, providing natural gas which was cleaner and cheaper than the locally produced coal gas variant, and the company stopped producing gas and became a supplier only. This led to most of the buildings in the Freemans Bay are being demolished.

Read more about this topic:  Auckland Gas Company

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.”
    —Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)

    “It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
    —Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)

    “The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
    —Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)